The crickets abandoned the yard
not long after you.
The evenings are too quiet now—

no big, dumb you exploring every 
bush and branch,
snapping and snuffling
through the thicket,
coming home 
with dirt on your nose
and covered in burrs,

goofy faced.

Just grass
and a sleeping garden.

The squirrels fear nothing.

I was a shy girl.
Some boys found my quiet ways
as inviting as
dappled groves in shady woods
(where each one ached to take me).

now I'm a shipwreck in a sundress,
an aimless, shameless coquette –
a first kiss, a second guess,
a weak and wobbly pirouette.

Towel clutched loosely
warm, blushing skin, damp with steam
cool condensation
distillation of lust, his
fingers wrapped in her wet hair.

The lotus calls another time;
right now, just bring your lips to mine—
a congress of the simplest kind,
yet steeped in fever, still divine,
this tangled frame of skin and breath 
urged onward to its little death
on rolling seas of hands and hips;
the synthesis of fingertips—
my shaking legs, a testament
to a winter's afternoon well spent.

It's been a week; I know you said
sometimes it may be hard to write.
I understand, I really do –
I've been very busy, too,
learning how to sleep at night
and falling out of love with you.

I pretend that your poems and 
my poems go
slumming in disguise;
carrying on in dark doorways
of riverfront bars—
tipsy, telling secrets,
spilling out into the sweet-smelling
night,
libertines 
more in love 
than they were before.

Forgiveness as a chosen way's
like bringing home a cagey stray;
it may bite, despite good will,
but tend your wounds, and feed it still.

Until now, my best work yet: a boat, a love, the Leonids.
Quite beautiful as heartbreaks go, a near miss on a midnight
lake, with wishes dropping left and right. I laughed at that,
said take me back, and until then, I thought I meant
to shore. Nice story; camera fixed on Indian Point, boat exits
left 'neath fireworks, sponsored by the Galaxy, brought to you
by Tunnelvision. Cue piano, pretentious fin, but then
you – a star: hotter than those meteors, colder than those
miles of lake. I wrote you in, rough draft, known as
the man who loved this woman best, but take your bow;
you've been recast: the man who loved this woman last.

In the minutes before sleep last night,
through stellar static, astral snow,
a poem, half dreamt, was born
and died; I drifted off and let it go.

Just one line survived the night;
that line will have to be enough.
I wrote it down before it faded:
sometimes we were good at love.